“Brian Sweany has re-invented the coming of age novel with Exotic Music of the Belly Dancer, a bawdy, unfiltered snapshot of adolescence. Hank Fitzpatrick, the hormonally challenged narrator of the story, has a remarkable capacity to be both nihilistic and tender—think Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas meets Leave It to Beaver—minus the literary pretense and relentless self-awareness of so many other protagonists in the canon.” –William McKeen at williammckeen.com, author of Outlaw Journalist: The Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson, professor and chairman of the Department of Journalism at Boston University

“For anyone who ever wonders about that guy in school who has more fun, more girls, more drinks, more sex, drugs, and rock and roll, more luck (and bad luck) of the Irish, Exotic Music of the Belly Dancer tells all. But behind every party is the hidden truth: that the world, if given time, will break your heart.” –Keith Donohue at keithdonohue.com, author of The Stolen Child, a New York Times bestseller and Library Journal Best Book of the Year

“Exposing the belly of the male beast is a brave thing to do. Brian Sweany writes like an American Martin Amis, and that’s a great thing.” –Alexandra Fuller at alexandrafuller.org, author of Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, a New York Times Notable Book for 2002, the 2002 Booksense best non-fiction book, a finalist for the Guardian’s First Book Award and the winner of the 2002 Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize

“Exotic Music of the Belly Dancer is funny and tragic, occasionally even a warm, homespun homage-to-me-familia, but it is the dark and subversive stretches that burned deeply into my psyche and kept me turning the page.” –Sonny Brewer at sites.google.com/site/tolstoypark, author of The Poet of Tolstoy Park and editor of Don’t Quit Your Day Job: Acclaimed Authors and the Day Jobs They Quit

“Prepare yourself for a nostalgic, strikingly honest trip back to your yearning youth. Exotic Music of the Belly Dancer is more than a romp, and it will do more than jog your memory: it will run your memory over with a juggernaut of hormones, teen confusion and dawning awareness.” –David L. Robbins at davidlrobbins.com, author of War of the Rats, founder of the James River Writers and co-founder of The Podium Foundation

Author Bio:

Since 2000, Brian Sweany has been the Director of Acquisitions for Recorded Books, one of the world's largest audiobook publishers. Prior to that he edited cookbooks and computer manuals and claims to have saved a major pharmaceutical company from being crippled by the Y2K bug. Brian has a BS in English from Eastern Michigan University, from which he graduated magna cum laude in 1995. He's a retired semi-professional student, with stopovers at Wabash College—the all-male school that reputedly fired Ezra Pound from its faculty for having sex with a prostitute, Marian University—the former all-female school founded by Franciscan nuns that, if you don't count Brian's expulsion, has fired no one of consequence and is relatively prostitute-free, and Indiana University via a high school honors course he has no recollection of ever attending.

Brian has spent most of his life in the Midwest and now lives near Indianapolis with his wife, three children, and a neurotic Husky/Border mix named Hank. He’s currently working on his next project, Making Out with Blowfish, which is the sequel to Exotic Music of the Belly Dancerand the second book in a planned trilogy.